Aaron J. Ancell

Bentley University
  •  203
    Liberalism
    In William A. Galston & Tom G. Palmer (eds.), Truth and Governance. pp. 193-215. 2021.
    Liberalism has a complicated and sometimes uneasy relationship with truth. On one hand, liberalism requires that truth be widely valued and widely shared. It demands that governments be truthful and that citizens have ready access to numerous truths. Some liberals even take facilitating the discovery and dissemination of truth to be part of the raison d’être of liberal institutions. On the other hand, liberalism is averse to proclaiming or enforcing truth. It detaches truth from political legit…Read more
  •  8
    Bias, Safeguards, and the Limits of Individuals
    Business Ethics Journal Review 10 (5): 27-32. 2022.
    The Radical Behavioral Challenge (RBC) contends that due to normal human cognitive biases, many standard prescriptions of business ethics run afoul of the principle that ‘ought implies can.’ Von Kriegstein responds to this challenge by arguing that those prescriptions are wide-scope obligations that can be fulfilled by recusing oneself or by establishing appropriate safeguards. I argue that this solution falls short of fully resolving the RBC because individuals will often be incapable of recogn…Read more
  •  31
    Corporate Counterspeech
    Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 26 (4): 611-625. 2023.
    Are corporations ever morally obligated to engage in counterspeech—that is, in speech that aims to counter hate speech and misinformation? While existing arguments in moral and political philosophy show that individuals and states have such obligations, it is an open question whether those arguments apply to corporations as well. In this essay, I show how two such arguments—one based on avoiding complicity, and one based on duties of rescue—can plausibly be extended to corporations. I also respo…Read more
  •  50
  •  61
    The Fact of Unreasonable Pluralism
    Journal of the American Philosophical Association 5 (4): 410-428. 2019.
    Proponents of political liberalism standardly assume that the citizens of an ideal liberal society would be overwhelmingly reasonable. I argue that this assumption violates political liberalism's own constraints of realism—constraints that are necessary to frame the central problem that political liberalism aims to solve, that is, the problem of reasonable pluralism. To be consistent with these constraints, political liberalism must recognize that, as with reasonable pluralism, widespread suppor…Read more
  •  38
    Political irrationality, utopianism, and democratic theory
    Politics, Philosophy and Economics 19 (1): 3-21. 2020.
    People tend to be biased and irrational about politics. Should this constrain what our normative theories of democracy can require? David Estlund argues that the answer is ‘no’. He contends that even if such facts show that the requirements of a normative theory are very unlikely to be met, this need not imply that the theory is unduly unrealistic. I argue that the application of Estlund’s argument to political irrationality depends on a false presupposition: mainly, that being rational about po…Read more
  •  18
    Robert Card criticises our proposal for managing some conscientious objections in medicine. Unfortunately, he severely mischaracterises the nature of our proposal, its scope and its implications. He also overlooks the fact that our proposal is a compromise designed for a particular political context. We correct Card’s mischaracterisations, explain why we believe compromise is necessary and explain how we think proposed compromises should be evaluated.
  •  89
    What do the biology and psychology of morality have to do with normative ethics? Our answer is, a great deal. We argue that normative ethics is an ongoing, ever-evolving research program in what is best conceived as human ecology.
  •  34
    Democratic theorists, especially since the advent of the deliberative democracy paradigm in the 1980s, have focused primarily on relationships involving citizens and their political representatives, and have thus paid scant attention to the bureaucratic agencies within the modern state that are presumed merely to “flesh out,” implement, and enforce the decisions made by elected officials. This undertheorized space between markets and democratic decision making, in brief, is where corporations an…Read more
  •  32
    Ethics & empiricism: what do the biology and the psychology of morality have to do with ethics?
    In Frans B. M. De Waal, Patricia Smith Churchland, Telmo Pievani & Stefano Parmigiani (eds.), Evolved Morality: The Biology and Philosophy of Human Conscience, Brill. pp. 73-92. 2014.
    What do the biology and psychology of morality have to do with normative ethics? Our answer is, a great deal.We argue that normative ethics is an ongoing, ever-evolving research program in what is best conceived as human ecology.
  •  118
    In her recent book, Democratic Reason, Hélène Landemore argues that, when evaluated epistemically, “a democratic decision procedure is likely to be a better decision procedure than any non-democratic decision procedures, such as a council of experts or a benevolent dictator” (p. 3). Landemore's argument rests heavily on studies of collective intelligence done by Lu Hong and Scott Page. These studies purport to show that cognitive diversity – differences in how people solve problems – is actually…Read more